Becta basics for schools

Summer sale: Resellers have been urged to pounce as back-to-school budgets are spent in the coming weeks

Security resellers have been urged to fill the void left by the scrapping of education technology agency Becta by pressing home the importance of data security to schools.

Becta was one of the first casualties of the coalition government’s quest for efficiency savings.

Alex Teh, commercial dir­ector at distributor Vigil Software, said Becta’s guidelines were a key driver of data security uptake in the education sector. He also expressed concerns about the long-term repercussions of its termination.

“Now that Becta has gone,” he said, “we do not want to get into a ­scenario where in a year or two there will have been a whole raft of laptop losses or information being ­misplaced, and no security on those networks.”

Teh said resellers should strike now as education sites offload their back-to-school budgets.

“Resellers need to be positioning to these education sites that data security is just as important as before,” he said.

Grahame Smee, managing director of distributor Cohort Technology, des­cri­bed Becta’s demise as bad news, but stressed it was incumbent on the channel to take up the slack.

“The responsibility doesn’t go away,” he said. “Every school, university, hospital or private enterprise still has obligations to secure any assets they have.

“The channel needs to ensure people understand what the imp­lications are, if they don’t have a comprehensive security policy.”